In Russia, brazen murder of Chernovik founder is unsolved

Gadzhimurad Kamalov, founder of the independent
daily Chernovik, was murdered in Makhachkala, capital of Russia's southern
republic of Dagestan, on December 15, 2011. The slaying was brazen, coming on the
national Day of Remembrance for journalists killed in the course of their work.
The late-evening assault took place outside Chernovik's
newsroom, located on Makhachkala's Magomed Gadzhiev Street. Equipped with numerous
security cameras, the street is a throughway for government motorcades,
including that of the regional president. Nobody moves undetected there. But Kamalov's
slaying is yet to be solved.

Investigators believe two guns were used in the
killing, although it is unclear how many people were involved in the deadly
assault. The identities of the assailants and masterminds have yet to be
revealed.

What is clear is what investigators have failed
to do.

Investigators have not found a weapon. They
concluded that two guns were used after examining bullet casings collected at the
murder scene, and bullets that Kamalov's family members handed to forensics experts
after extracting them from his body during traditional ablution at a local
mosque. No autopsy was conducted; Kamalov was buried on the day of his death per
Muslim tradition.

Investigators failed
to retrieve recordings made by the dozens of security cameras set up in
multiple locations on Magomed Gadzhiev Street. Chernovik's journalists did this on their own initiative. The
images were of poor quality, however, and investigators could not identify the
license plates of the suspected getaway Lada sedan, regional police sources with
access to the case file told CPJ.

Efforts
to track the getaway route have also failed: Police checkpoints, set up
immediately after the murder throughout Makhachkala, did not spot the Lada, and
a traffic-control video-streaming system, called Safe City, was not
functioning. Police
sources who spoke to CPJ on condition of anonymity said they did track phone
calls made by people they consider suspects in the killing. The calls, they
said, indicated that the suspects began following Kamalov in late November
2011.

This
was not an ordinary murder. Kamalov, the founder of an influential independent
newspaper that dared to criticize powerful regional and federal security
agencies, had considerable influence in Dagestan. His opinion mattered greatly in
regional politics. Before he was shot, Kamalov put his newspaper's weight behind
a favored candidate in the coming municipal elections in the Gunib district of Dagestan. His funeral turned into a spontaneous procession,
several thousand strong; the crowds remained peaceful thanks to Kamalov's
influential relatives and fellow villagers.

The
federal Investigative Committee, headed by Aleksandr Bastrykin, has remained
silent on the contracted slaying. Given the large public outcry, this silence has
been odd.

Ali
Kamalov, head of the Dagestan branch of Russian Union of Journalists (RUJ) and
Gadzhimurad's uncle, told CPJ that unsolved killings of journalists in the
region--the group counts 16 in 15 years--demands action. "We wrote an open letter
to Bastrykin, urging him to take all of these cases under his personal control
and assign federal-level investigators to carry out the probe," Kamalov told
CPJ. The letter was signed by 105 members of parliament. Ali Kamalov
said family members of slain journalists met with the representatives of the Investigative
Committee and the Interior Ministry in July 2012, laying out their views of the
cases.

Gadzhimurad
Kamalov's relatives and Chernovik
staffers attended that meeting, and told the officials that they believed
regional police were involved in at least some of the killings. Ali Kamalov said
relatives demanded that Moscow investigators be put in charge of the cases to
avoid conflicts of interest. Instead, Kamalov said, they have been fed
unsupported assertions that guerrilla fighters and radical Islamists were
behind the series of deadly attacks. The relatives have been denied access to
the case files.

In the case of Chernovik's
founder, his relatives and colleagues told CPJ that they believe that he
was murdered in retaliation for his reporting on the municipal elections in
Gunib. In articles published before his death, Kamalov called on district
residents to vote against the candidate supported by most regional power brokers,
a person he accused of corruption.

Although the possible motive seems clear to Kamalov's family,
investigators have not done much to pursue it, the slain journalist's brother,
Magdi Kamalov, told CPJ. "Although we personally delivered and passed the
information on potential motive and masterminds in the murder to Bastrykin and
Vladimir Kolokoltsev, Russia's interior minister, there were no active measures
taken or results announced. I think that the major reason for such inaction is
a potential involvement into my brother's murder of high-ranking police
officials in Dagestan." Magdi Kamalov said that the family had requested that
agents of the FSB, Russia's security service, be commissioned to work on the
case alongside the regional investigators. But the request was denied, and the
family has been kept in the dark about the investigation. "They don't even
inform us of their decision to extend the probe, and this is a grave violation
of the victims' rights," Kamalov said.

One lead that regional investigators have actively pursued, CPJ learned,
is a much different one--that Nadira Isayeva, Chernovik's former chief editor and the 2010 recipient of CPJ's
International Press Freedom Award, was somehow involved in Kamalov's murder.

The lead, which Kamalov's colleagues and relatives call absurd, first
surfaced two weeks after the murder. On January 1, 2012, a publication called
"All truth about Gadzhimurad Kamalov's murder" was posted online by anonymous
users. The material consisted of several audio files containing bits and pieces
of phone conversations between Chernovik's
current editor, Biyakay Magomedov, and Kamalov and Isayeva. The files also
included conversations with Isayeva's husband, Abdulkhalim Abdulkerimov,
who is imprisoned on a variety of charges from forgery to robbery.

The files were edited to accuse Isayeva of hiring members
of regional guerrilla groups to murder Kamalov. After the files were uploaded
online, Chernovik staffers approached
the investigators with their questions: Which IP address was used to publish
the files? Which security service sanctioned and taped the journalists? Who
published the recordings online?

"Investigators failed to answer any of these
questions, even though it could have helped them identify the source of this
false lead," Magomedov told CPJ.

At the time of Kamalov's murder, Isayeva was long gone
from Chernovik's staff. She resigned in
June 2011 and left Dagestan shortly after, first for Moscow then to attend a year-long
professional development program in the United States. This did not stop
investigators from showing up at her parents' house in January 2012 with a
summons--one that was missing an important detail. "Neither I, nor a lawyer whom
I had to hire shortly after that visit, have any idea about my status in the
case," Isayeva told CPJ. "Am I a witness? Or do they see me as the primary
suspect?" she asks. She and her lawyer tried to get in touch with the
investigators to clarify this several times, Isayeva said. Her lawyer filed
several requests asking investigators if they were interested in questioning her
by phone or via Skype. After Isayeva arrived in the United States in February
2012, her lawyer suggested that Russian investigators ask their American counterparts
to conduct the questioning.

"They should be interested in carrying out an
objective probe into Kamalov's murder. As someone who worked with Chernovik's founder for more than six
years, I could be quite a valuable witness in his murder case, and can tell
them what I know," Isayeva told CPJ. She said her attempts to cooperate have
been fruitless.

A postscript: Recent developments show authorities have not
forgotten about Isayeva. She told CPJ that investigators in charge of Kamalov's
murder recently visited her imprisoned husband. After they left, she said, Abdulkerimov
was interrogated by the prison authorities in connection with the July 2011 murder
of Garun Kurbanov, a regional administration official. One of the questions
they asked Abdulkerimov was whether Isayeva visited him in jail before or after
the official's murder. As in Kamalov's case, it appears that authorities are seeking
to connect Kurbanov's killing to Isayeva. A month before Kurbanov was shot, Isayeva
publicly disagreed with the official during a hearing on human rights in
Dagestan. The incident was reported in the press
following official's murder, and seems like the investigators consider it as
another case against the journalist.

Elena Milashina is an award-winning, investigative journalist with Novaya Gazeta and a Moscow correspondent for CPJ.